question about windows 10 power plans - desktop

danlightbulb

danlightbulb

danlightbulb

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Hi all,

I was reading a windows tweak/optimisation guide (https://tweakhound.com/2015/12/09/tweaking-windows-10/13/)

It talks about power plans and recommends setting the high performance power plan, rather than the default balanced power plan, for a desktop pc.

I have tried this, and the CPU remains constantly at maximum even when system is idle. Even though CPU is at 4.4GHz constantly, temperatures do not rise.

So my question is, is it ok to do this, or should I leave the balanced plan in place so that the CPU reduces to 800MHz at idle?

What are the advantages/disadvantages of either approach? I'm not necessarily bothered about power saving features, but I don't want or need the system to run faster or hotter than it needs to.

Thanks
 
When you set the plan to High Performance it tells the OS to run the CPU at its maximum speed, regardless of usage.

If there is no activity then temps will likely change very little if at all, as the CPU isn't actually doing anything, the downside to this is that it takes more power to keep the CPU at that maximum level all the time.

In much older systems it was often advised to turn off CPU power management because the frequent changes in speed that occur when load is added or removed could and sometimes did cause instability when using certain programs/games, nowadays the power management systems incorporated into the hardware and software side of things is much more stable and much more reliable.

Ultimately, the only difference should be the power bill.

As an aside, the plans listed in the power options are just different presets, you can alter all of them to be identical or tailor them for your personal needs.
 
agree power bill predominately,
the article did not seem to try and justify the approach and I think guy who wrote it was just being payed write an opinionated article (unlike this comment)

if the system is continually as higher clock rate the cpu temp will be higher and lifespan/reliability reduced (electronics/semiconductor testing often raises temperature to simulate aging) in contrast if the system can control the clock dynamically as the load demands, maybe there are some situations where response is slower until system spools up, but cannot believe that will be perceptible for user experience
(if you had an automatic stock trading system maybe, where ms across the Atlantic count ;))
 
Oh ok. I followed that guide i linked above quite extensively and removed a load of inbuilt apps, disabled some services etc.

Im a fan of removing the bloat.
 
maybe there is a growing 10 equivalent, but a lot of the 7 stuff,like sevenforums just carries across - articles have comments which keeps the authors honest. (I suspect many of the relevant&wise discussions under 7 may not get migrated into 10 tweak guides - wheels will slowly get re-invented )

[ My top productivity tweaks I need to re-discover for windows 10 are
"Window focus follows mouse and focussed window not moved in stack"
"Wider window border" (need to load a new gui style apparently)
]
 
danlightbulb said:
Oh ok. I followed that guide i linked above quite extensively and removed a load of inbuilt apps, disabled some services etc.

Im a fan of removing the bloat.
Click to expand...

Getting rid of stuff you don't need is one thing, but 'bloat' is not going to be an issue on a PC with a quad-core CPU and 16GB of RAM.
 
True, these days bloat is less of an issue, but there's no reason why any of us should just accept wasted CPU cycles, RAM, and drive space because it's unlikely to affect our systems adversely. If something is of no use to me, and I can remove it, I will do so.
 
In the days of XP and single-core CPUs I'd agree, but nowadays the benefits are mostly in one's head. Doesn't mean I don't do the same thing to an extent but I'm not going to sit here and try to quantify it as a meaningful amount of 'resources' being saved.
 
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